Hamas police officers stand guard, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Gaza City, Oct. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

NBC’s July 24 coverage of current events in Gaza leaves readers with more questions than answers. Critical readers will notice that authors Chantal Da Silva, who has a history of one-sided reporting on Israel, and Matthew Mulligan, omit key details when describing the ongoing ceasefire. The authors paint Israel as the sole aggressor against a defenseless civilian population, attempting to persuade readers of a conclusion by omitting all contradictory evidence.

The slanted narrative begins with the piece’s title: “Israel steps up deadly strikes and expands physical barrier in Gaza despite truce.”

NBC’s readers are immediately handed the narrative on a platter, that Israel is violating the ceasefire’s terms and that these alleged violations are the reason that the ceasefire isn’t progressing. Before even beginning the article, Da Silva and Mulligan immediately tell readers that it is Israel’s fault entirely that there is still fighting in Gaza.

“There is a ceasefire in Gaza. Israel has been nonetheless stepping up deadly strikes,” the article opens. Once again, Israel is painted as the actor holding back progress. The article continues:

[T]here has been an identifiable rise in deadly Israeli attacks in Gaza during the past three months … This is despite the ongoing truce between Israel and Hamas, meant to halt fighting in the war-battered territory and see Israeli troops pull back to a temporary boundary before a fuller withdrawal under a final peace deal.

But this narrative is only one side of the story. According to the Trump-administration brokered 20-Point Plan for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, Hamas must disarm before any full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. The group has refused to budge on that demand.

Point 13 of the plan states that “All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt. There will be a process of demilitarization of Gaza…” But these things haven’t happened.

This stipulation was further reinforced by the Board of Peace’s High Representative for Gaza, Nikolay Mladenov. In May, he stated that any further Israeli concessions, including the near-total withdrawal from Gaza and halting of airstrikes against Hamas, depend on the terrorist organization accepting a proposed disarmament process.

“Failure by Hamas to accept the framework within a reasonable timeframe … shall render such [Israeli] commitments null and void,” Mladenov stated in May.

The plan, crafted by President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace and explicitly endorsed under United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803, gives international legitimacy to the demand for Hamas’ disarmament. Otherwise, Israel has always reserved the right under the plan to carry out airstrikes against Gaza-based terrorists and terrorist organizations to prevent them from reconstituting.

Sticking with the theme of missing context, the article cites the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) NGO, which shows that “a total of 117 air and drone strikes [were carried out by Israel] across Gaza in June… [of which] ACLED said 44 appeared to target Hamas members and other militants and police.”

Here, Da Silva and Mulligan are steering readers to infer that if only a certain number of strikes target Hamas, one could conclude that the remaining strikes were directed at civilian or non-military targets. Though the quote does include the phrasing, “other militants,” failing to explain which of Gaza’s at least eight other Salafi-jihadist terrorist organizations were targeted in strikes leaves the reader with an incomplete understanding. One of these groups, which is not mentioned by name, is Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIC), which remains an active party to the conflict. The article also fails to identify strikes that targeted weapons caches, and other non-personnel terror infrastructure. Without this context, readers cannot fully evaluate the significance of reported figures surrounding airstrikes.

Additionally, Da Silva and Mulligan report that “At least 134 people were killed in Gaza in June, and more than 30 people were killed just last week, according to the Palestinian health ministry in the coastal enclave.” However, the authors fail to inform readers that the health ministry, which remains the primary source of casualty data in Gaza, is administered by Hamas. Additionally, Da Silva and Mulligan do not inform readers that the ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Israeli sources estimate that at least 22,000 Hamas terrorists were killed during the fighting, with an additional 1,600 terrorists killed on October 7 during the Hamas attacks in southern Israel. NBC does not inform readers of these figures, leaving readers to infer that all reported casualties are civilians.

The article also relies on Doctors Without Borders, known by its French name Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). This is the same MSF that only recently admitted that terrorists have utilized Gazan hospitals since the Hamas-led October 7 atrocities, after denying Israeli allegations of the sort for years. The group also has a dedicated campaign page to “stop the genocide” in Gaza, indicating that despite its humanitarian role, it has taken a political stance, a form of non-neutrality that should be explained in the piece.

NBC’s readers deserve more than the one-sided narrative Da Silva and Mulligan provide, which presents Israeli military actions in isolation while omitting the ceasefire’s conditions, Hamas’ continued refusal to disarm, the role of other Gaza-based terrorist organizations, and the limitations of its Gaza-based sources. Readers should be given the information necessary to evaluate competing claims for themselves, not guided toward a predetermined conclusion through omissions and incomplete context.

That is the distinction between journalism and activism: journalism equips readers with the facts to reach their own conclusion, while activism arranges those facts to convince them of one. By repeatedly excluding material facts that complicate its preferred narrative, NBC’s report abandons the former in favor of the latter, leaving readers with an incomplete and ultimately misleading account of why the Gaza ceasefire remains stalled.

The author writes for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.